One-third of Boston pools will be closed this summer

Matthew Haugh has gone to Draper Pool in West Roxbury since he was 5 years old.

“I was looking forward to getting back to it,” Haugh said. “I just moved back to the city after being away for a while, but when I moved back, the Draper was closed.”

He’ll have to wait a few months longer. The pool closed for renovations in fall 2022, and the city had planned to reopen it by this summer. But in a community meeting Tuesday evening, city officials said the reopening date has been pushed back due to an issue uncovered earlier this year: when the pool was filled, it kept leaking. Now, officials expect they’ll need another three to six months to design and build a new surge tank.

That makes the Draper one of six city-owned pools that will remain closed all summer. It’s an improvement from last year, when nine of the city’s 18 pools were shuttered — including all public pools in Mattapan and Dorchester. Some are closed due to disrepair; others are shut down just for the summer to accommodate sustainability upgrades to the school buildings they’re housed in.

“Because of a collaboration between Boston Public Schools, Boston Centers for Youth & Families, the Public Facilities Department, and the Property Management Department, investments of City funding, and improved facilities assessment, the City is on track to have more pools open this year than in previous summers, including the BCYF Clougherty, Hennigan, Marshall, Mattahunt, and Perkins pools,” Sandy Holden with Boston Centers for Youth & Families told GBH News in an email.

The Marshall pool in Dorchester and Mattahunt pool in Mattapan both reopened in the past year, and the Clougherty pool in Charlestown is set to open later in the summer after a $35 million renovation.

City Councilor Erin Murphy, who has held multiple hearings on pool and summer camp availability, told GBH News that the widespread closures are a “newer” issue.

“A lot of the pools probably were close to breaking but weren’t broken — right?” Murphy said. “Looking at the numbers last summer, where nine pools ... were shut down, you know, is not something that had happened in the past.”

Mayor Michelle Wu proposed millions in the coming fiscal year’s budget for pool renovations — specifically, to begin renovating the currently closed Holland pool in Dorchester and Blackstone pool in the South End.

Wu told GBH News last year that getting more pools open to the public is a priority for her administration.

“We want every young person growing up in Boston to know how to swim, have access to swim lessons — and that means we need our pools to be open,” the mayor said on GBH’s Boston Public Radio last August. “There have been many, many years of deferred maintenance on the pools.”

Murphy says, in past years, several factors kept pools closed during the hottest months.

“One is the hiring of lifeguards to staff the pool,” she said. “The second is making sure that the pools are — if they needed any upkeep, any work on them, that they were done. The third issue that we’re having now also is that several schools with the Green New Deal are being scheduled.”

In prior years, staffing shared the blame amid a national lifeguard shortage. But officials this year had no concerns about their level of lifeguard hiring.

Marta Rivera, the commissioner of Boston Centers for Youth and Families, said she doesn’t anticipate issues with lifeguards this year after the city put in effort to recruit new hires.

“We’ve also removed a lot of barriers,” Rivera said Tuesday. “So, not only have we increased salaries in the last year to compete with others, but we’ve added incentives and bonuses.”

The city also operates the Curley public beach, known as the L Street Beach. Other pools are also open this summer, like the DotHouse Health pool in Dorchester and state-run pools in Brighton.

As for the Draper, property manager Sam Lovison was confident Tuesday that the pool was in its final stage of repairs.

“We are working very diligently to address these issues, not only at the Draper but other facilities throughout our portfolio,” Lovison said. “But particularly at the Draper, I really do believe that this is the last thing we have to do.”